AI is causing a crisis of agency. Back in the web-traffic-obsessed days of 2018, at a time of dawning awareness of how easily audiences online could be manipulated and spoofed by bots, the writer Max Read argued that the internet had crossed a threshold known as "the Inversion." Not only had bots proliferated across the internet; they had come to constitute it. In outnumbering humans, bots were also loosening everyone's grasp on the very reality of online experience. "What's gone from the internet, after all, isn't'truth,' but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be," Read wrote.

We Asked the Author to Explain How He Used AI. A book about how AI shapes perceptions of reality came under fire for using AI-generated quotes. Its problems go beyond that. Earlier this month, WIRED published an excerpt from Steve Rosenbaum's buzzy new book,, which looks at how artificial intelligence warps people's sense of reality. Shortly thereafter, The New York Times reported that the book contained over a half-dozen made-up or misattributed quotes.

Plus: Trump has postponed an AI order due to overregulation fears. Anthropic's Code with Claude showed off coding's future--whether you like it or not At Anthropic's developer event in London this week, Code with Claude, attendees were asked if they'd shipped code written entirely by Claude. Almost half the room raised their hands. Many admitted they hadn't even read the code before pushing it live. As tools like Claude Code get better, more and more developers are happy to hand their work off to AI. Anthropic says it wants to push automation as far as it will go. But not everyone is convinced that's the right approach.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Bored.com is back, and it feels like the Internet remembered how to be weird Bored.com Back in the Flash era, it was packed with browser games, weird quizzes, and random internet junk you'd spend hours perusing. Then Flash died, most of those old sites faded away, and Bored.com It just reinvented itself into something even better: A user-curated collection of the best online time-killers.

Adult content creators are having their performances used without consent. This is just one way that AI now threatens their rights and livelihoods. When Jennifer got a job doing research for a nonprofit in 2023, she ran her new professional headshot through a facial recognition program. She wanted to see if the tech would pull up the porn videos she'd made more than 10 years before, when she was in her early 20s. It did in fact return some of that content, and also something alarming that she'd never seen before: one of her old videos, but with someone else's face on her body. "At first, I thought it was just a different person," says Jennifer, who is being identified by a pseudonym to protect her privacy. But then she recognized a distinctly garish background from a video she'd shot around 2013, and she realized: "Somebody used me in a deepfake."

OnlyFans' First-Gen Creators Are Retiring--and Some Are Begging You to Forget They Exist As more sex workers quit the industry, some are having to navigate tough questions around consent and the "afterlife" of work they no longer want to be associated with. On April 28, just before noon, Win White logged onto X and posted a series of messages to his 65,000 followers who, until that moment, were mostly unaware of his past as an OnlyFans creator. If you see it, save it cool," he wrote . "I know where I've been and I think I'm entitled to a life after that at least." That morning White, 29, had received several DMs about an old clip of him making rounds. Though he has done his best to separate his old life from his new one--last year he deleted his OnlyFans account and the separate X account where he posted content--it often has a habit of catching up with him. "All that work that I did for OnlyFans, I did out in California.

Ahead of the hit show's finale, cocreators Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello talk about media consolidation, the perils of censorship, and why they find AI "deeply disturbing." If you're a WIRED reader who uses AI in any creative context, I'd suggest staying far, far away from anyone involved in the TV show . In an interview earlier this year, actor Hannah Einbinder (who plays young comedy writer Ava Daniels on the show) described AI creators as "losers," "not artists," and "not special." In a wide-ranging conversation for ahead of the series finale on HBO Max, Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello were resolute about the value of human creativity--and what can be lost when AI enters the picture. If their work on is any indication, Downs and Aniello (along with their third cocreator, Jen Statsky) would be wise to stick with the tough, tiring, absolutely-no-shortcuts approach they take to making entertainment. Across five excellent seasons--if you haven't seen the show, I really do recommend it-- has been praised for its sharp writing and wit, and its thoughtful portrayal of Deborah Vance and Ava's complex, constantly evolving relationship. The show has also acted as something of a mirror for the real-world entertainment industry, weaving in plotlines that tackle everything from media consolidation to corporate censorship to, yes, artificial intelligence. The show's cast and creators have been on a media whirlwind as it all comes to an end. When they came knocking on WIRED's door, we jumped at the chance to chat, and I was lucky enough to spend an hour with Downs and Aniello--both WIRED subscribers, much to my delight--earlier this month. KATIE DRUMMOND: Lucia Aniello and Paul Downs, who I just learned are married, congratulations and welcome to . You should have been there. You should have been there. Ugh, why didn't we bring you? We are going to renew for our 10-year at the same place though. Lucia was born in Italy, so it was closer to a lot of family. And you were married in what year? You have time to find your look. A major priority for me in my life is perfecting my look. We do work at Condé Nast, and my boss is Anna Wintour.

Digg is back again and has taken on yet another form: A website that aggregates news about artificial intelligence. Digg's job is to find that signal and bring it to you. AI is just the beginning, he said, calling it the noisiest, fastest-moving space on the internet. He promised that more verticals are coming, but he didn't say when Digg will start aggregating news about other topics. At the moment, the website follows 1,000 people directly involved in AI research, investing and media, built from X's social graph.

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Launching next week on T-Mobile's network, the cell plan takes a nuclear approach to online safety. A new US-wide cell phone network marketed to Christians is set to launch next week. It blocks porn, which experts in network security say marks the first time a US cell plan has used network-level blocking for such content that can't be turned off even by adult account owners. It's also rolling out a filter on sexual content aimed at blocking material related to gender and trans issues, which will be optional but turned on by default across all plans. The network, which is currently being tested ahead of its May 5 launch date, will be run by Radiant Mobile, a newly launched mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). These operators don't own cell towers but buy bandwidth from the big providers (in this case, T-Mobile) and sell to specific demographics (President Trump announced his own MVNO last year called Trump Mobile; CREDOMobile sends donations to progressive causes).